


Love Will Tear Us Apart

by UniverseOnHerShoulders



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Memory Loss, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-27
Updated: 2017-04-27
Packaged: 2018-10-23 12:17:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10719204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniverseOnHerShoulders/pseuds/UniverseOnHerShoulders
Summary: Faced with Bill and her enigmatic grin, the Doctor reflects on a lost companion, her forgotten smile, and the hole in his hearts she had once filled.





	Love Will Tear Us Apart

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by the events of The Pilot, and written in an hour-long flurry of creativity immediately after watching the episode. General angst ahead. Enjoy.

Oh, how she’d smiled. Bill had smiled and he’d thought that might heal the hole in his hearts but somehow it wasn’t enough; somehow the light contained within her – the light of possibility and hope – was not enough to warm his weary, aching soul. Her smile, in short, was not _her_ smile. It was both too much like her, enough to make him yearn for the familiarity of his old friend, and not enough. Gods, it could never be enough, that much he knew. He scarcely remembered Clara – to his chagrin; to his shame – but he remembered her warning, and so he had tried to heed it with Bill. Tried to take her by the hand and shout “run,” or variants thereof. Tried to heal. Tried to be happy, even as a smiling photograph of his wife looked on in silent judgement, chastising him for forgetting someone as important as Clara. Chastising him for breaking a promise, and forgetting how to live in the wake of her death, and in the wake of the hole in his memories where a smiling, intelligent English teacher had once been.

As his hands had gone to Bill’s temples, her words had struck him to his core. Struck him and reminded him of his uncertain discombobulation, his wanderings, his panic at being unable to remember a thing. Reminded him of a faceless waitress in a nondescript diner that he half-recalled, but not for the right reasons. He couldn’t inflict that pain on anyone again – not when he knew the consequences; not when he knew how much it hurt to have a span of time erased from your memory and nothing but confusion and agony left behind. Not after Donna. Not after Clara. Well, not after Clara’s interference, and the impacts he would live with until the end of his days. There was nothing there, where her memory had once resided in his temporal lobe. Oh, the irony of the name. The irony of a Time Lord with a non-functioning, corrupted temporal lobe. And it was all Clara’s fault, that much he recalled. That much he wanted to curse her for, but found he could not. He suspected he would never be able to do so, although he was not entirely sure why.

There was a hole where she had been, yes. A hole that had once contained all the knowledge of what makes up a person, in the same way that he was now aware – hyper-aware, even – of Bill, and what constituted her personality, her experiences, and their joint adventures. He knew snippets of information on what had happened to her, although he had never gone looking for the information – instead he had caught sight of a memorial wall at a school that contained far too much pain to ever be a comfortable destination, and recalled the actions that had damned him to this exquisite torture, so many billions of years in the future and at the other end of the universe. 

He remembered a beautiful death, devoid of the shape and sound and colour of her, but still there. A picture-perfect, storybook death that she would have so adored, had she been able to appreciate it. (He knew, of course, that she had the opportunity to do so, but somehow thinking of her existing separately to him seemed to wound him more than the thought of her dead, lying in peaceful tranquillity on a cobbled street in London that seemed wet with the tears of the thousands of people she’d saved while at his side.) She had died well, in a way that he found abjectly horrifying now – the notion of a good death. Because he knew that such a term was a fallacy. There was no such thing as a good death, because no matter who died, someone would suffer. Someone would hurt. Someone would weep, and hearts would be broken that should not be broken – in this case his, although he had little to no recollection of the agony of it; instead finding his chest aching at the thought of the shape of her. He flinched away from such a shape now – unwilling to exacerbate the pain that River’s death had already caused him after Darillium, and unwilling to recollect the loss of Clara. His Clara. 

He remembered _that_ epithet, certainly. Remembered how it sounded in his mouth, and thought about giving life to the words several times. But somehow speaking them aloud would make them tangible and horrifying in a way that he was not sure he was willing to confront, and thus he’d mouthed them with only perfunctory curiosity, the feel of them tugging at his hearts and causing a dull ache that started somewhere behind his sternum and robbed him of his breath. That ache was the reason he sought to avoid remembering much beyond Darillium, or New York. The reason he could not bear to think of London, or return to a school he had once loved. The reason he was holed up in a dark, musty office in Bristol, tutoring a student for reasons he was unclear on, in topics he was only vague about. The distant, lingering echoes of a promise he had made once, a thousand years ago. 

 _Be a Doctor._  

Oh, he could be a doctor, lower case d, PhD, thank you very much. He could take the stage and strut and spout facts with the best of them. But his enthusiasm for being a Doctor – of the kind he had so adored being, of the kind he had epitomised in his moniker – had waned, and he found himself avoiding adventures, and saving planets, and protecting worlds. It did not seem the same without Clara by his side, and he had not yet – to his sincerest regret – met anyone who measured up to her, or approached the exacting standards she had set. Nardole was sometimes profound, and occasionally funny, and he served his function, but he was not Clara. He could never hope to be Clara, and so the Doctor had vowed to remain alone and unencumbered – or unblessed – with female companions, lest his hearts be broken again. 

Because he could not deny it. The ache in his chest was heartbreak, and that meant only one thing – he had loved her. Oh, he could not recall her, and oh, the thought of that broke his heart, but he knew one thing for certain and one thing alone: he had loved her, with every fibre of his being. River had known, because River had always known, and she had held him on Darillium as the tears came pouring out and he had wept on her, bodily wept on her, as they were supposed to be celebrating their last night, but all he could do was mourn a woman he barely recalled. She had held him, and reassured him, and he had sworn to her that he did not love her any less for it. She understood, of course. She always understood when it came to his companions, and she knew that Clara was of pivotal importance to him – Clara had saved him, and for that River did not begrudge her a share of the Time Lord’s affections. River had witnessed Clara’s most heroic of decisions, and for that she held no ill will for the selfless girl who had made the ultimate sacrifice to save the man they both loved. For he knew that too, although he could not recall the specificities. Clara had loved him. She had been willing to die for him, and that was not a decision to be taken lightly. Heroism was in her nature, but heroism was – in his experience – always born of love, and when she had stepped into his timestream she had taken on a sworn duty. A sworn duty that he hoped against hope would prove to have long-reaching consequences, and would bring Clara back to him in some form or another. Perhaps it already had, and he had been too obtuse to notice. It seemed very much like him, and so he had started paying the utmost attention to each student he encountered; each faculty member; each stranger on the street. Perhaps he appeared weird, but he didn’t much care. He would not miss her again, and if the damn neural block would permit him to recall her face then he longed for another encounter with every fibre of his being. 

Then Bill had come along, and he had wondered for a moment – a long moment – whether this was _her._ Whether this was an echo, a reincarnation, and that was why he felt so drawn to her. It was a long while before he realised that she was not, but that he was drawn to her in the same way he had been before Clara: in that she was curious, and she was alone, and that she was… different. 

_I never know why. I only know who._

And here she was – here she was, funny, and smart, and asking all the right questions, and he knew that she was the tonic to cure his ills. But she was not Clara. She never could be. He had to stop drawing comparisons, and see her as her own person, untainted by the half-memories of a companion that never was. He had to take her hand, and run, and not look back. But damn, it was hard. Harder than it had ever been before. 

_Run, you clever boy. And be a Doctor._

He was trying, goddammit, he was trying, but the world seemed against him at every turn, and his brain against him at every obstacle. His rationale hurt his brain, so he tried not to think about it.

He just ran.


End file.
